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Thursday, February 6, 2014

Barack Obama was once a constitutional law professor, but now views
the founding document as irrelevant. The president is ruling by decree,
instead of working with a divided Congress.

The Founding Fathers
would be appalled by the way the current occupant of the White House has
usurped power to get his agenda passed.

There is nothing to restrain Mr. Obama, now a lame duck, from forcing his liberalism on America.

For
example, the White House declared Wednesday that it will not go through
Congress to create regional "climate hubs" to deal with the supposed
crisis of "climate change."

This comes on the heels of a week of
grandstanding at events in which he tells Americans "I will act on my
own" and throws out new executive orders for everything from schools to
job training to hiring decisions.

The president thinks the American people will view him as a benevolent leader and not a tyrant for dictating policy.

Mr.
Obama announced in his State of the Union speech last week that he
would use executive orders to raise the minimum wage for federal
contractors.

He proclaimed the Treasury Department would make a new type of retirement savings account (myRA).

The
president declared he would push for more federal gun control "with or
without Congress." (This would be in addition to the more than 20
executive actions he's taken in the past year to infringe on Second
Amendment rights.)

Speaking to all the elected officials in the
legislative branch, Mr. Obama said he would use his executive powers
"wherever and whenever" he could.

One GOP congressman, Rep. Steve
Stockman from Texas, walked out of the House chamber in the middle of
the speech, saying that he "could not bear to watch" as Mr. Obama
"continued to cross the clearly defined boundaries of the constitutional
separation of powers."

The day after Mr. Obama's address to
Congress, Sen. Mike Lee asked Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. in a
Senate Judiciary Committee hearing whether the president was consulting
him on the legality before issuing executive orders, as is required.

The
Utah Republican is a former Supreme Court clerk and specialized in
Supreme Court litigation in his private practice before being elected to
the Senate.

Mr. Holder responded that the Justice Department was
consulted on raising the minimum wage and the unilateral decision last
July not to enforce the employer mandate in Obamacare until after the
midterm elections.

The attorney general offered that Mr. Obama had
"made far less use of his executive power at this point in his
administration than some of his predecessors have" and would only do so
in the future when "he is unable to work with Congress to do things
together."

Mr. Lee forcefully told Mr. Holder that the number of
executive orders was irrelevant. It was the nature of the decrees. "He
has usurped an extraordinary amount of authority within the executive
branch.

This is not precedented," the senator said. "I point to
the delay — the unilateral delay — lawless delay, in my opinion, of the
employer mandate as an example of this."

Sen. Chuck Grassley, the
ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, followed up this week
with a letter to Mr. Holder asking him to make public in real time the
opinions and analyses that Justice uses to determine the
constitutionality of executive orders.

The Iowa Republican pointed
out that "this specific measure of transparency" will allow Americans
to understand the legal basis for the orders and allow them to be
challenged if necessary.

While Mr. Obama's use of executive orders
specifically is on par with past presidents, he uses other tools of the
office to force his will on the country, such as presidential
memorandums and massive numbers of rules and regulations that would
never get through Congress.

Since Obamacare was passed on Capitol
Hill, all the implementation decisions have been made by the White House
by regulations and rules.

The health care law might be a thousand
or so pages long, but it has become virtually a shell for this
administration to use however it likes to force its agenda, such as
making religious institutions violate their beliefs and pay for birth
control for their employees.

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